Monday, September 28, 2009

Arts-Photography - Bing News

Arts-Photography - Bing News

Photography, celebrity and mutation - Globe and Mail

Posted: 25 Sep 2009 01:08 PM PDT

EDWARD STEICHEN: The starmaker

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion – organized by the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography in Minneapolis – takes us back to the beginning, assembling for the first time the American photographer's work for Condé Nast publications between 1923 (when he was hired to be photographer-in-residence) until 1937, when Steichen got bored and decamped for an afterburner career at the helm of the Museum of Modern Art's fledgling photography department.

He was America's uber-photographer. Starting out as a painter and photographer of moody, softly focused Pictorialist cityscapes, figure studies, still lifes and landscapes (his 1904 nocturne Moonrise, Mamaroneck sold in 2006 for $2.9-million, establishing a world record price for photos at auction), Steichen was in cahoots with Alfred Stieglitz and the New York Photo-Secession crowd, a group championing photography as a fine art, and was deeply embroiled in the avant-garde art circles on both sides of the Atlantic. It was Steichen, for example, who organized the first exhibitions of Picasso and Matisse in New York, at Stieglitz's Gallery 291.

Steichen was also employed in both wars as head of aerial reconnaissance for the U.S. military, honing his technical skills to a razor's edge in a field that relied on photography's workhorse veracity.

When he turned to become photographer-in-residence at Condé Nast (shooting for Vanity Fair and for Vogue), he found himself positioned between these two extremes: His work on assignment was utilitarian (selling, by turns, glamorous human talent or desirable consumer products), but it was also imbued with aesthetic allure and human insight.

It was Steichen who forged the link between fame-making and photography, in the modern sense, and we can understand him today as a kind of pre-Warholian seer. Earlier photographers, like Baron de Meyer, shot garments. Steichen, by contrast, created a new recipe: He shot the models, who, almost incidentally, were wearing the clothes. His muse – the lithe, almond-eyed beauty Marion Morehouse – was elevated in his pictures to become the first supermodel.

People were his fascination, and his modernity was expressed in his interest in their inner states, so evident in his smouldering image of Clara Bow, her face soggy with sensuality and her hand a bloated claw, or the enigmatic playwright Noel Coward, posed sphinx-like in the shadows beside Egyptian feline statuary – sirens whose features seem to emanate the dark drives, repressions and neuroses catalogued in the writings of Sigmund Freud.

He was modern, too, on a stylistic level – in his obvious affinity with the work of the German Bauhaus designers and the Russian constructivist avant-garde. From these, he drew his minimalist sets and penchant for clean, refined lines, the human subject and his or her setting reduced to the leanest possible composition of shadow and light.

But Steichen also positioned commercial photography as painting's kissing cousin. Cast out from the garden of art-for-art's-sake by his former Photo-Secessionist colleagues, Steichen loaded his studio work with references to fine art's past and present. His portrait of comic actress June Walker, for example, echoes the portraits of German painter Christian Schad. An African totem perches on a plinth in his 1935 photograph of the model Margaret Horan, evoking the artistic craze for tribal art on the other side of the Atlantic, following Picasso. The voluptuous, baroque sensuality of Italian mannerist painter Parmigianino reverberates in his images of women of leisure, resplendent in furs and jewels, their hands clasped in aristocratic repose.

Most importantly, perhaps, Steichen was modern in his view of his female subjects – they seem sharp, knowing, spirited and ambitious, with their own destinies to pursue. He delivers the gamut: a chummy, affectionate portrait of tomboy Amelia Earhart, her knees drawn up to her chest in girlish glee; the close-lidded Joan Crawford in her floor-length, ink-black Schiaparelli gown (1932), her body sheathed like a dagger; Gloria Swanson (1924), regarding us through a veil of lace with the dark, liquid eyes of a leopard. These are women of destiny, and Steichen was clearly fascinated by their power, their character, their sexuality and their accomplishments.

VANITY FAIR PORTRAITS: Still showing Steichen's influence

Steichen's themes reverberate in the sweeping cross-section of work in Vanity Fair Portraits, at the Royal Ontario Museum, which covers the magazine's first incarnation from 1913 to 1936 – when Steichen was the reigning master of the genre – and then resumes with the magazine's rebirth in 1983 until today. (The exhibition was organized by Vanity Fair and the National Portrait Gallery in London.)

In many respects, photographers have continued to rely on Steichen's bag of tricks. Psychology and inner life brims like lava in Annie Leibovitz's 1988 portrait of opera diva Jessye Norman, her face convulsed with emotion. Steichen's sleek graphic modernist style shows up in Horst P. Horst's portrait of the architect Richard Meier, its geometries as taut as a Mondrian. Art-history-as-muse appears in Leibovitz's double portrait in the buff of Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley, the pose drawn from Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe. Michael Thompson's picture of Julianne Moore, in the pose of Ingres's Grande odalisque, is a kind of love song to the female nude through the ages.

Following Steichen's lead, too, the heroic female subject surges onwards: in Norman Jean Roy's 2004 shot of Hilary Swank, running on the beach like winged Mercury (her bum and breasts as firm as stress balls). One wall holds an enormous blow-up of Diana, Princess of Wales (by Mario Testino in 1997, and softened with the merest suggestion of blurring), next to Helmut Newton's gritty close-up encounter with the hooded-eyed but never hoodwinked Margaret Thatcher – the quintessential power victim up against the ultimate dominatrix. The force of each is incontestable.

But some observers see a tradition in decline. William Ewing, the Canadian-born director of the Musée de l'Elysée and one of the co-curators of the Steichen show, said to me at the press conference this week: "Sometimes I buy fashion magazines, feeling like the pictures are very fresh and new. But by the time I get home, they are already rancid. They're meant for instant effect." So what's missing today? "There has to be that spark," says Ewing. "There has to be some emotional depth, some sense of that slow fuse of the self – glowing, radioactive in the picture." he continues. "When I look at a picture of Kate Moss, it's just a girl with an enigmatic face who has been asked to put these things on." Likewise the latest celebrity portraits. "There's an admission that this is fake, the person is fake, the situation is fake. They let you see the machinery."

True enough, but this postmodern irony is very much of our times, with the subject held up for view within an imaginary set of quotation marks: Michel Comte's Geena Davis (1992), lolling in the back of a pink, tail-finned convertible like a sixties Hollywood starlet, or Arnold Schwarzenegger poised atop a mountain in retro ski clothing, calling down the ghosts of Leni Riefenstahl, in Leibovitz's cover shot of 1997. In today's media industry, the performer is often mobilized before the camera as a symbol, as a surface, not as an individual. Some of these pictures reflect that and seem touched with cynicism accordingly.

Others, however, go to the other extreme, simulating spontaneity. Thus we discover actress Helen Mirren in her dressing room, surrounded by the mess and clutter of backstage, in a shot by Lord Snowdon. Or a rascally Jack Nicholson in his morning-after regalia (slippers, crumpled housecoat, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip), teeing off from his backyard green in the Hollywood Hills, shot by Leibovitz. In the past, the public wanted gods and goddesses. Now we want BFFs, the more deshabille the better.

Still, the power of the medium that Steichen fought so hard for continues to build, with Leibovitz summoned to the White House to sell the presidency of George W. Bush (for good or ill), or Jonas Karlsson called out to document the men of Engine Company 50/Ladder Company 19 in the aftermath of 9/11, creating images that could allow a nation to move forward out of its fear and grief.

People in the arts often complain that artists cannot change the world. Clearly, they are not thinking about Steichen and his kindred spirits.

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years, 1923-1937 is at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008 is at the Royal Ontario Museum Institute for Contemporary Culture. Both exhibitions continue until Jan. 3.

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